The tipping point of Downey’s career comeback was Iron Man, the 2008 blockbuster that firmly established him as a marquee attraction. But in many ways, Downey was an unlikely choice for the role of a costumed superhero, even one whose alter-ego was playboy industrialist Tony Stark. Not only was he a recovering addict with a lurid dark side, but as an actor, he’d spent much of his career playing off-center, irony-drenched supporting roles. But as director Jon Favreau explains in this GQarticle, Downey’s acting skills made him overlook those negatives, and the director worked hard to persuade Marvel Comics — which owned the character and was dead-set against Downey — that he was the man for the part. “Here was this force of nature, who I think was living with this frustration that he wasn’t able to really show what he was great at, because nobody was willing to take that leap and say, ‘This guy could carry my movie.’ Nobody was willing to jump in the pool. I was.”

Reinvention 101: 5 Lessons from Robert Downey, Jr. via Yahoo! Movies

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s swashbuckling sleuth returns in the second installment of Sherlock Holmes, entitled A Game of Shadows. The second film starts off with the world’s only consulting detective hot on the trail of the notorious Professor James Moriarty (played to diabolical perfection by Jared Harris), who has hatched a series of plots meant to culminate in a terrible catastrophe of a global scale. 

Read More